"A critic is like a eunuch in a harem. He's right there every night. He sees it done every night. He sees how it should be done every night. But he cannot do it himself."
-- Brendan Behan

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Best cast ever?

Murder on the Orient Express:

Albert Finney as Poirot (amazing in a pinched, freaky way; better than David Suchet in the A&E series, much more daring than the great Peter Ustinov in Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun), Lauren Becall (already old in 1974), Sean Connery (ditto), Ingrid Bergman (ditto, but also briliantly funny), John Gielgud (already really old), Vanessa Redgrave (eerily young-looking and glowing), Jacqueline Bisset (ditto, but also preposterously beautiful), Michael York (remember him?), Martin Balsam (dude has 166 entries on imbd.com, including Seven Days in May), Anthony Perkins (playing, for a change, a nervous, effeminate young man with mommy complex), Jean-Pierre Cassel (even more roles than Balsam, almost all of them in French films, often opposite Seberg, Bardot, Deneuve, etc.) and on and on.